


Acarpous

by Vintar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vintar/pseuds/Vintar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only clock she hears tick-tocking involves carbon-14, and boy, she could talk for hours about it!</p>
<p>In which Jade English has better things to do than gestate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acarpous

She’s sick of a lot of things. Glossy tabloid headlines that say the same things over and over. Photos of her walking and talking with male investors, the width of her waist, her shirt riding up to show a slice of stomach. Interviewers that tap their pens and through coy smiles say “Now, for a more personal question…”. 

Jade English has her stamp on telecommunications hubs, on deep-sea exploration tech, in giant machines that wheel through space, but after their polite nods all that the media wants to know about is her insides. The worst part of it is that her adoptive mother has nothing to do with it. It’s a perversely human desire: _Here’s Jade English, child lovingly held in her arms, see, she’s just like us after all…_

She starts to answer questions about babies with talk of her new particle accelerator- cute as a button and so well-behaved! When they talk about pitter-patters, she talks about Geiger counters. The only clock she hears tick-tocking involves carbon-14, and boy, she could talk for hours about it!

“I have to say, your talent for obfuscation is enviable,” says a writer, come to tour SkaiaNet’s high flux reactor for inspiration; something about alternative universe scenarios and spacetime, which Jade finds interesting, and wizards, which she profoundly does not.

Jade gives her a look from under her safety glasses. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Not really,” says the young woman, and smiles a little. “Assholes get things done.”

(Years later, Jade is flipping through news stories when she catches a glimpse of the woman on a chat program, now grown into her black lipstick. She answers personal questions with such amazingly convoluted horseshit that the interviewer doesn’t even notice she hasn’t actually answered them, and Jade high-fives the newsbot monitor.)

Eventually, calls for reproduction start appearing on cereal boxes, all white on red. _Have one for mom, one for dad, and three for the reproductive stability of the human population!_ Jade measures her victories in every contract that SkaiaNet steals out from under CrockerCorp’s nose and every month that she finds blood in her boxers. When she grows old enough that the latter stops, she pushes the former further. 

When CrockerCorp pushes back, it’s savage. SkaiaNet’s shares go down, and the majority of her facilities go with it. Strangers with forged security passes infiltrate the core labs, and a handful of her most trusted staff die in mysterious lab accidents before CrockerCorp turns its focus towards her. The assassin they send after her had clearly been massively under-informed about the offensive abilities of people who are used to working with deadly equipment every day, but the next one surely won’t be; Jade slams his head in the autoclave door until he stops twitching, then salvages the scraps of her life’s work and runs for it. A fixed-wing aircraft drops her in the middle of the Pacific, with all of SkaiaNet on a series of hard drives and necessary core tech nestled safely in lead-lined suitcases. 

People on the parts of the internet that aren’t under the Crocker-branded thumb are certain that SkaiaNet will rise again, but when Jade goes to put together a chromatograph for her scrappy island laboratory she finds her fingers a lot less deft than they used to be. The edges of her vision are blurry, even with her glasses. When she stands up from her workbench, her back aches.

The internet offers many tips about coming to terms with old age, but few about how to rebuild a global technology empire. She spends a while sitting on the beach, reading Complacency of the Learned and firing warning shots at the great pale monsters that watch her. To her great dismay, wizards remain profoundly uninteresting.

“The truth is, there’s always a bigger asshole!” she tells the moody monochrome photo of the author. The photo offers no comment.

When the meteor strikes and Jade finds the little brown child, curled up fat as a larvae in the crater, she isn’t impressed. No belated kraken of maternalism arises from her belly to grab her with its tendrils. He has a funny little nose and a mouth full of teeth, and he doesn’t flinch at the curious poke of her rifle barrel. 

She picks him up under one arm and lopes off to her laboratory, just to be sure. Her machines, beplastered in their cute rainbow stickers, take his blood and spit out numbers; he’s human from big bobble head to miniature toes, and her DNA is curled up in him like a message in a bottle.

She has never been able to imagine growing another human from herself like a fruit from a tree, but when she looks at him she doesn’t think of that.

She thinks of grafting.


End file.
